Art Exhibitions and Art Sales: Year In Review 1993

Art Sales

As the recession eased slightly during 1992-93, the super-rich began to buy art again, but with caution. Auctioneers’ seasonal turnover, measured in dollars, changed very little compared with the previous year. Christie’s recorded a 1% improvement on the 1991-92 season and Sotheby’s 4%. These figures were much in line with the January-to-July sales totals announced by Paris auctioneers, which were up 3% over 1992 in terms of French francs. American collectors were the strongest art buyers over the year. Their return to the market led to a revival in the Impressionist and modern markets. In contrast, economic turmoil in Italy and Spain led their nationals to withdraw from the market, leaving many Old Master pictures unsold.

The 1980s boom had been particularly concentrated in Impressionist and modern pictures, as was the fall in prices in 1990-91. Fears that this market would not recover were put to rest in May 1993 when Sotheby’s sold a Cézanne still life, "Nature morte--Les Grosses Pommes," for $28.6 million, double the presale estimate. Shortly afterward the most expensive art deal ever struck outside the auction room was announced. Walter Annenberg, the American publishing tycoon, had bought Van Gogh’s "Wheat Field with Cypresses" for $57 million from the family of the Swiss arms manufacturer Emil Bührle, who died in 1956. Bührle’s magnificent collection of modern masters is housed in a private museum in Zürich, Switz. Annenberg bought the picture as a gift for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, to which he had promised to bequeath his own collection.

The recovery in prices for lesser works still had a long way to go, however. The November 1992 forced sale of pictures that the flamboyant Paris dealer Alain Lesieutre had used as collateral with his bank in the boom times starkly underlined the problem. The paintings were auctioned in Paris without reserve and made between one-third and one-fifth of the prices Lesieutre had paid in 1989-90. Dubuffet’s great circus picture, "La Calipette," which had set an auction record for the artist’s work when Lesieutre paid £2.3 million for it in April 1990, was down to F 6 million; a Degas "Dancer" was down from F 4 million to F 1.5 million; and a Miró pastel, from F 3.2 million to F 550,000. The first signs of recovery came at the New York sales in November 1992 when Sotheby’s sold one Matisse, "L’Asie," to the Kimbell Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, for $11 million and Christie’s another, "Harmonie jaune," for $14,520,000--reputedly to an American businessman.

The new American confidence was also reflected in prices for flashy Victorian pictures--which had a strong following in New York City--and 19th-century paintings by American artists. The French artist James Tissot and the Dutch painter Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema--both of whom worked in Queen Victoria’s England--turned out the top runners. Tissot’s sentimental "L’Orpheline"--a woman and a little girl on an autumn riverbank--made $2,970,000 at Christie’s New York in February and Alma-Tadema’s orgiastic Roman banquet scene, "The Roses of Heliogabulus," £ 1,651,500 at Christie’s London in June. Their American contemporaries proved even more expensive. Childe Hassam’s "Room of Flowers" made $5.5 million and a pastel of "Peonies" by William Merritt Chase, $3,962,500.

In the Old Master field, the J. Paul Getty Museum of Malibu, Calif. (whose collections were threatened by the southern California wildfires in October), managed to carry off almost all the great works on offer with little competition. Its most sensational purchase was a drawing by Michelangelo of "Holy Family with the Infant Baptist on the Rest on the Flight into Egypt," which cost £4,181,500 at Christie’s in July, the highest price ever paid for a drawing. The handsome compositional sketch had been hidden away in an English country house, Great Tew in Oxfordshire, since 1836, and its existence was virtually unknown. In December 1992 the Getty Museum spent £4,950,000 on a Goya, and in May 1993 it spent £ 2.3 million on a landscape by the German painter Caspar David Friedrich. In between it bought, for an undisclosed sum, a Rubens "Entombment" that the American collector-dealer Alfred Bader had picked up at Christie’s in December 1992 for a bargain £ 1,045,000.

It was a relatively quiet year for the decorative arts, broken here and there by the emergence of a particularly sensational object or collection. While prices for Georgian furniture drifted lower, the £1.8 million sale of a magnificent Regency desk made for the Marquess of Anglesey--who led the cavalry at the Battle of Waterloo--set a new auction price record for English furniture.

Islamic art, which had been in little demand since the 1991 Gulf war, staged a recovery in April. One of the earliest products of the Turkish potteries at Isnik, a blue and white candlestick made around 1480, sold for a record £ 617,500, while a 17th-century silk and metal thread "Polonaise" became the world’s most expensive Persian carpet at £ 441,500. The auction market in Chinese art suffered from a lack of Japanese and American buyers, but a Hong Kong financier, Joseph Lau, set a new auction price record for Chinese ceramics when he paid $2,860,000 for a 46-cm (18-in) wine jar with a Jiajing reign mark (1796-1820) at Sotheby’s New York in December 1992.

Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis of Germany, selling off a miscellany of unwanted silver and jewelry to shore up the family finances, struck an exceptionally strong market in October 1992. A jewel-encrusted snuffbox made for Frederick the Great of Prussia around 1770 set an auction record at Sw F 2,530,000, while the Société des Amis du Louvre spent Sw F 935,000 on a pearl and diamond tiara made for the Empress Eugénie’s wedding but subsequently acquired for a Thurn und Taxis bride.

Meanwhile, the year’s most sensational auction muddle was Christie’s sale of an early 19th-century gilt and lacquered brass mechanical calculator by J.C. Schuster, which, although estimated at £ 20,000, brought £7.7 million. The successful bidder, the well-known Swiss dealer Edgar Mannheimer, told Christie’s that his client did not intend to pay; the underbidder, Bernhard Korte, director of the Research Institute for Discrete Mathematics in Bonn, Germany, later revealed that his museum’s price limit had been £ 200,000 but declined to reveal why he had continued bidding up to £7 million.

The recession began to be felt in the book market in 1992-93, a good two years behind other market sectors. It made owners reluctant to sell and produced a thin year; prices, especially for major rarities, were off the top, but there was no dramatic fall.

Americana was the exception to the rule, where prices actually rose and remained strong all year. On Nov. 20, 1992, Christie’s set a new auction price record for American manuscript material when they sold an album kept by Caroline Wright, a friend of Abraham Lincoln and the wife of the governor of Indiana, for $1,320,000. Lincoln had copied the concluding paragraph of his second inaugural address into the album--the famous lines beginning "With malice toward none; with charity for all"--and signed it. Christie’s had been estimating $300,000-$400,000 before the sale. Sotheby’s had a similar estimate on a single leaf inscribed with a draft of Lincoln’s "house divided" speech, probably written in the winter of 1857-58, which was offered one month later and revised the manuscript record upward to $1,540,000. It was bought by the Gilder Lehrman collection, an assembly of historic Americana that investment bankers Richard Gilder and Lew Lehrman were forming.

In Sotheby’s May sale of Americana, Visual Equities Inc. of Atlanta, Ga., a troubled art-investment group, offered the early printing of the Declaration of Independence for which it had paid $2.4 million two years before. This time the bidding failed to reach the $2 million low estimate, and it was sold after the sale at an undisclosed price to Kaller Historical Documents.

The only other deal that stretched into seven figures was Lord Shelburne’s sale of the papers of Sir William Petty (1623-87) to the British Library, negotiated by London book dealers Bernard Quaritch. Petty was a pioneer of theoretical economics, and his survey of Ireland, which underpinned the Cromwellian land settlement, was the first scientific, district-by-district, survey of any country. Quaritch also negotiated the sale of Lord Harlech’s collection of medieval manuscripts to the National Library of Wales.

Among the most expensive failures of the year was a group of 43 letters written by the Earl of Essex to Queen Elizabeth I in the 1590s. Sotheby’s had expected to make £ 500,000, but no bidder appeared. Christie’s was expecting the same kind of price for a copy of the first book printed in English, William Caxton’s English translation of a text by Raoul Lefèvre entitled The Recuyell of theHistories of Troy, but it was also left unsold.

Named collections, as usual, made for successful sales. Christie’s offered the library of the late John Sparrow, warden of All Souls College, Oxford. Although the Bodleian Library and several Oxford colleges had been allowed to pick what they wanted beforehand, the sale made 50% above estimate. The remainder of the library of the earls of Granard--most of which was burned out in the 18th century--attracted similarly enthusiastic bidding at Sotheby’s. The collections of two famous book dealers reached the sale room. The private collection of the late Alan Thomas, which had never been for sale, met an enthusiastic reception. The remaining stock of E.P. Goldschmidt was more difficult to sell since it had been available to the market, but Goldschmidt’s bibliographical reference library was fiercely fought over.

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